Previous studies have investigated the acoustic properties of Korean sibilant fricatives, with some attention given to effects of native dialect and language on both their production and perception. The current study investigates the effects of native dialect and language on the perception of Seoul Korean fricatives by testing the identification of fricative-initial CVs by native Korean speakers from Seoul, Daegu, and Jeju, as well as native Mandarin and Japanese second language learners of Korean. The results show that although native Korean listeners are far more accurate than non-native listeners, there was no significant variation within the native and non-native groups themselves. The results also show an inverse relationship between identification accuracy and vowel height that was consistent across both native and non-native listeners. This finding is in line with previous studies showing that the cues to the contrast are stronger in low vowel contexts than in high vowel contexts.

This paper reports and analyzes the tonal patterns that emerge in South Kyengsang monosyllabic nouns that exhibit two well-known analogical changes in stem shape, one involving coronal obstruent codas and the other stems with an underlying cluster. By the first change, underlying and orthographic /nach/ ‘face’ inflects as nat̚, nach-ɨl (conservative) or nas-ɨl (innovative); and by the second underlying /talk/ ‘chicken’ inflects as tak̚, talk-ɨl (conservative) or tak-ɨl (innovative). We find that many such nouns with a high-low tonal pattern change to high-high when inflected with the segmentally innovative stem. We propose that this tonal change supports the model of Korean noun paradigms proposed in Albright (2008) and Do (2013) in which the citation form serves as the base for the construction of the suffixed forms. If the base is a neutralization site, then learners select the alternant in which they have the greatest confidence of scoring a correct hit when undoing the neutralization.

The present study proposes an L1 grammar-driven loanword-adaptation model with three intermediate steps — L1 perception, L1 lexical representations and L1 phonology — between L2 acoustic output and L1 output by examining how the distinctive features, syllable structure constraints and structural restrictions of one’s native language steer speakers in their search to replace foreign sounds with native sounds. Our main source of data in support of this model comes from differences between the Korean adaptations of English and French voicing contrasts on the basis of a recent survey of English and French loans in the year 2011. In word-initial position, for example, English voiceless plosives are borrowed as aspirated plosives, while French voiceless plosives are borrowed as either aspirated or fortis plosives in free variation. Considering the data examined here, we suggest that the different Korean adaptations of English and French voicing contrasts in plosives are based on Korean speakers’ perception of redundant phonetic variants in the donor languages (L2) and that this perception is conditioned by the acoustic cues to the laryngeal features [±spread glottis] and [±tense] of Korean, the host language (L1). In contrast to some current models, it shows that the distinctive feature composition of L1 segments plays an important role in loanword adaptations. We also suggest that not only L1 laryngeal features but also L1 syllable structure constraints and lexical restrictions influence L1 perception of the L2 voicing contrasts in word-final postvocalic plosives and that variation in vowel insertion after the plosives in our 2011 data collection is motivated by L1 phonology in both English and French loans. Variation in vowel insertion after English and French word-internal preconsonantal coda plosives is also affected by the native phonology in the 2011 data, no matter whether the plosives are released, as in French, or unreleased, as in English.

The single English phoneme /s/ can be borrowed into Korean as either of two different phonemes — lax /s/ or tense /s*/. The present study investigates how Korean native speakers process English /s/ by testing the role of the duration of English /s/ in determining the choice of phoneme in Korean. Two production experiments were conducted with twenty-eight participants, who were asked to repeat English pseudo-words in Korean. The results suggest that (1) the split borrowing pattern is indeed regular and systematic, and (2) while duration of English /s/ is certainly one factor in determining the split borrowing pattern, it may not be the key factor.